La Petite Mort
by Nyah
Summary: "You're going to forgive me for the pearls."
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Standard fair. Not owning just blatantly using for my amusement. It's kind of cruel of me probably but I don't think they're complaining.

Note: In response to an LJ prompt asking for Bruce thinking of Selina in the pearls and nothing else. Not really any plot here. I know. I never do that. Allsexytimes and no character growth. Here's to change.

**Le Petite Mort**

Bruce Wayne had always slept like the dead. From childhood-exhausted from play-to adulthood-muscles languid, body grievously punished—it was his habit to fall asleep like he was falling into the grave. He dropped off so fast that more than one childhood sleepover with Rachel Dawes had seen her checking his breath to make sure he was still alive.

It was a weakness, he knew, but one of the few he'd never bothered to guard against. And these days, less than ever. The Batman wasn't a hero any more; there weren't any enemies to catch him sleeping.

And so it was that it took a hand on his inner thigh, nails scraping the length of an old scar, to penetrate the satin shroud of sleep that draped his mind. He fought in the manner of dreamers against heavy lids and heavier limbs, adrenaline outpacing instinct, instinct outpacing thought. And so it was that by the time speech fell thickly from his mouth, his body had already seen to the threat. "What …?" His eyes were last to adjust, sluggish pupils just beginning to accommodate, confirming what he'd already learned from scent and touch.

His addled brain inventoried position of trunk and limbs. He'd woken fully astride a body, knees pinning down hips and braced against warm, decidedly feminine curves. His right hand pinned one much smaller to the mattress. And then there was his left arm pinning a pair of shoulders inelegantly so his forearm pressed at the tender flesh of a neck. And there, in the dim glow of moonlight and distant Gotham, was a string of perfect pearls, trapped in the junction of his forearm and the intruder's collarbone. Her collarbone.

"Ms. Kyle." Her face was inches away from his own, too close, almost, to be discernible. But he could make out the sweep of her cheeks, the soft, sculpted blades of her lips. "Those are my mother's pearls."

The body beneath him was warm and pliant, no struggle lurking its limbs. She didn't even acknowledge his forearm braced across her neck except to stretch that neck luxuriously, exposing the graceful, vulnerable traces of veins and arteries. "Which is why I'm returning them, obviously," she said, like it was.

"We've met twice," he argues. "And both times, you stole from me."

"Your point?" Her eyebrows raise and he can see the exact place her lip would curve if she weren't biting down a smile.

The hand not pinned to bed had remained free, it skated down his ribs now, almost tickling. If she'd had a knife she could have gutted him with his own body weight. As things stood, her fingertips were roaming low on the plane of his abdomen. No fumbling ventures for her, he might have her pinned but she was circling like he was prey.

"Why you'd bother returning something now is not obvious." And then, because he knows she expected to unsettle him, "And why you'd do it naked …. Unless it's …. Is this guilt? Did you crash my car?"

He watches laughter take her unawares, her body shaking and features dissolving from smirk to grin. The hand on his belly stops, palm going flat as that calculated, seductive composure cracks for a moment. "You're funny. For a billionaire shut in."

She recovers quickly, limbs suddenly tense, and flips them over so he's the one trapped on his back. "I don't do guilt, Mr. Wayne," she's all glorious swagger now, breathy voice raising his auditory nerves to hum with proximity.

The heavy blankets of his bed, twice-twisted, leave little to the imagination. As if his body hadn't already noted the feel of every curve. The string of pearls swims in his vision, bright against the richer tone of her skin, hard against the soft rise of her breasts. "I'm not immune to a good sob story." Her lips drop from his ear to graze just beneath it. He's sure she's close enough to hear him swallow hard. "Orphaned boy, mama's pearls." He can almost hear an eye roll in her voice but her lips fasten on his neck and he forgets immediately. "But you did say they look better on me. What's a girl to do?"

She leans down to kiss him then. There's no rush to it. She kisses like she has all night, like she can have him however long she wants. When he realizes his hand have stayed exactly where she pinned them, even with hers wandering, he thinks she might not be wrong. He let's out a breath, one louder than he intended and commingled with some epithet not even he can hear.

"Was that a suggestion?"

"You seemed to have it all figured out." He dips a hand under the blanket, fingers moving as purposefully as hers had when their positions were reversed. That he was aroused, she couldn't have failed to notice but he didn't plan to be the only one coming undone.

She doesn't gasp when he finds her wet and warm, only closes her eyes in a self-satisfied smile, letting her head loll while her hips circle. She gazes down at him from under heavy lids. "You're going to forgive me for the pearls."

"Like you care," he says, voice harsher now more like the one he'd worn so often in the dark.

She places a palm flat against his chest, leaning so the pearls hang between their lips. Her hands wraps around him in a fist, gliding, guiding. "It feels a little like I care, doesn't it?"

He wakes up rudely, shuddering on the brink of climax, feeling electric with the lingering wet dreams of a billionaire shut in. He groans into the sheets, banishing half-remembered images of an impudent thief in nothing but a string of stolen pearls.

But his brain calls up the scent of her on his sheets and his skin remembers the warm weight, gone hot where their bodies touched. His body was not going to submit to the cold iron of his will, not after so long, not after the way she smiled. "I don't do guilt, Mr. Wayne," she'd said. He resolves to follow her lead.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: See part one

Note: This was going to be a one-shot but then I thought, why?

_**Chapter 2: No you're not **_

"I'm sorry they took all your money, Mr. Wayne!" It's her way of taking back a tiny shred of control after he barged into her home uninvited and … well, she recognizes the irony in that complaint.

"No, you're not." He springs back like a child to the doorframe to catch the last word and it hits her that this is a third face to Bruce Wayne she's seen in as many meetings. The realization kills the comeback forming on her tongue. _Two-faced_, people call her, the cat burglar who lives all nine lives inside of one. If two-faced is an insult then what's a girl to call Bruce Wayne?

Someone with a shot at keeping up.

"Asshole," Jen says from the doorway to the bathroom. And then, "He likes you."

Instead of citing all evidence to the contrary, Selina replies, "Everybody likes me." It's true, they do, right up until they don't.

It's starting to rain and she watches Bruce Wayne stare at the ancient, faded remains of the city bus map that adorns her street corner. His hair's too long out of it's neat slick and it drips onto his shoulders. There's something so young about him just now, like all that money was a weight he was waiting to shake off. She hates for that too.

He's soaked through in minutes, the fine white fabric of his collared shirt gone nearly transparent, clinging to the strong lines of the body she first saw swathed in a bathrobe and shuffling behind a cane.

"You're staring," Jen says and Selina can hear the smirk in her voice. She knows how Jen thinks, knows her friend is always hoping for a fairytale but she'll take a good scandal any day.

"You should have seen the guy when we first met," Selina says in way of explanation. "He looked more like a corpse."

Jen's still smirking but then she stops, her face folding into its rare, genuine shape. "Damn, Selina."

"What?"

"I mean the guy disappears for like ten years and people are talking about facial scars and a hunchback and all that shit and then you show up and suddenly he's all back from the dead and looking like sex. I don't know, baby girl … sounds like your fault. You're kind of responsible for him."

"I took something her cared about," Selina replies, turning back to the window. "Take the one thing a person bothers to put in a safe out of a house full of expensive shit and you're going to get some attention."

Jen backs off with the philosophizing and just smacks her lips at Wayne, now lounging with his back against the bus stop sign. Selina wonders if he feels their eyes on him. The force of his gaze was something of sticking point for her since that first meeting when she stood to find him staring hard at her down the sight of a bow. For an absurd moment she wondered what it meant when the ghosts started seeing _you_.

The dance floor had been different. Gone was that look in his eyes like a raw nerve, like long-dormant senses were awake for the first time in years and focused on nothing but her. In a suit and tie he'd been elegance incarnate, pinning her with eyes so open she knew he was hiding more than she could ever guess. He'd been armored in good manners and good will, even as he slipped the pearls from her neck as if the theft hadn't troubled him at all, as if…. Maybe Jen had a point. Whether he knew it or not, Bruce Wayne was trying pretty damn hard to act like he took nothing she did personally.

She wonders what it would be like to run into this new Bruce, this prince of beggars, at a high society event. She can picture it now, how he catches her at yet another charity gala, something insane and exclusive. He's broke but welcome with open arms because the invitation was already written in his blood.

She's after a mark with a mild fetish for the sight of an exquisite spinal column known in certain circles and her gown is cut daringly low in the back to accommodate. All night she's felt the eyes on her skin and the whispers that follow, feels the hovering charge of a dozen hands tempted to skim the line of her back. Then there's a hand warmly, gently, _boldly_ crossing the line that's tantalized Gotham's aristocracy for the better part of a night.

His hand doesn't linger but rises to her shoulder, leaving a span of skin across her lower back that seems to notice suddenly that it's naked. There's no shock on her face when she turns to see Bruce Wayne, only when she sees that he's almost grinning, delighted to see her, delighted to catch her at her game.

It's Elton John or some shit providing the music because, yes, it's that exclusive. "Dance with me." And, god, she'd laugh in his face but there's this _note_ in his voice she can't pretend to miss. He's not talking foxtrot, he's talking tango.

"I hate this song," she says.

"No you don't ," he replies, pulling her close, closer than she wants to be to him. Or anyone.

He knows it, she can see it in his smile, feel it in his step across the dance floor, The last time they danced he was all justice and dignity and she answered by stealing his car. This time he's not holding back, he's caught her and he's gloating the way he wouldn't allow himself to do that last time. This is revenge. Broke and bankrupt, he's lighter, rising up through the cracked surface of the billionaire recluse, the half-mad wunderkind who had never been more than a lost cause.

"I'm sorry they took all your money, Mr. Wayne," she says.

His grin nearly cracks her composure. He laughs shortly at the familiar joke. "How sorry?" Heat rises in her blood at the way he doesn't even try to sound innocent.

"Here's a hint," she says, pulling him close, leaning till her lips skim his Adam's apple. "If you're going to try for emotional blackmail make sure you try it on someone who cares."

He kisses her then, raises her chin with the barest of touches. He doesn't steal a kiss the way she had; she has time to see it coming, just not enough time to convince herself to turn away.

"It feels a little like you care."

She lingers too long against his lips for any statement of denial to ring true. "What do you want, Mr. Wayne?"

He looks like he's about to kiss her again but she's got a palm against his chest and they've stopped in the middle on the dance floor. And, fuck, she hates to make a scene. Unless it's one she planned.

He wraps a hand around her wrist like a conspiracy, like instead of enemies they might just be sparing partners. "I'm poor now," he says. "I could use a place to sleep tonight."

The laugh she chooses is polished and haughty and delivered right in his face because this has to be a game. "You want to stay at my place? You still have a mansion."

"I like your place," his hands around her waist are very warm with long fingers lingering lower than good manners dictate.

"I'll make you sleep on the floor." She puts a lifetime of sass into the curve of an eyebrow but in the soft party light he looks like an angel and standing this close he smells like sin. She breathes him in and finds herself being kissed.

"No you won't."

People are probably looking now because that's Bruce Wayne's life; he shows up and people pay attention. It's not the kind of position she wants to be in, barring the GCPD, this is the last crowd she wants remembering her face.

Her heart's beating too fast and he's probably ruined her chances of buttering up her mark and she's finding it unaccountably difficult to lie. What she does is suck his tongue into her mouth, kiss him like he's never been kissed by a cool, rich, Gotham girl. It was that or say, "Probably not," and she's not quite that far gone.

He's not some hard-smitten mark who smiles at her stupidly and can't believe his luck. He breaks the kiss, looking down at her from the advantage of height. "Get your coat." It's not a command just an inevitability.

"Selina." Jen shoves gently at her shoulder. "Selina."

"What?" She asks, annoyed and too warm despite the early autumn chill.

"Welcome back."

"What?"

"I called your name like five times. I was starting to think you had a seizure."

Selina turns a skeptical look to her friend. "I'm standing."

Jen snorts, "Barely. Did you go weak in the knees for a minute there or was that me?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You don't think it got a little hot in here? You know, with poor Bruce Wayne down there all soaking wet and…."

"Jen?"

"Yes?"

"Shut up." Selina takes a last look at her erstwhile victim and current tormenter. His clothes and hair are plastered to every plane and angle of his body. He looks like a half-drown cat. One with very nice shoulders. "And call a taxi for that poor sucker."

_To be concluded …_


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: See part 1

**Chapter 3: Metaphorical Storms**

Selina follows him on instinct. By now she's learned every scrap of information about Bruce Wayne is worth uncovering. Because even when he looks like a used up madman in a bathrobe he might, at any second, change shape right there under your grasp; change into something that waltzes and smiles and sidles up to bite you in the ass.

She doesn't really expect him to hop in a cab to Batman's secret lair or anything so utterly stupid and convenient. But her gut says she's not done with him yet. Or he's not done with her. Which means the same thing. If there are other motivations feeding her gut—unease over his casual manner, his devil-may-care recklessness—well, the point of instinct is fight or flight. She'll sort the rest out later.

Besides, it's not as if following him is exactly a difficult task. And it's not exactly following since she has every intention of beating him to his destination.

Selina interrupts the call Jen is making to the cab company, asking for a particular driver, one who will cheerfully text his next fare's destination for a very reasonable kick back and take the scenic route for no additional charge. Granted, it's not like there are many places Bruce Wayne is likely to go. She and Jen are already halfway to the Palisades when Lu texts the address to Wayne Manor. They have a good head start on the taxi but Jen picks up speed anyway, lamenting the darkening sky and the dubious wiper blades on the Honda she'd picked up on 34th.

"Shit, I wouldn't even picked up this POS if someone hadn't left the cover off the damn cigarette lighter. Like, hello, please break into my car because clearly I've hidden my GPS in the glove box."

Selina laughs at Jen's mock distress. "And now here you are left with a moral dilemma: click 'home' and return the car safely there, teaching its careless owner a lesson or click 'home' and liberate a few items while the owner is obviously not at home and teach him an even better lesson."

"Exactly," Jen says emphatically. "You should have kept the Lamborghini."

Selina grins at the memory of the vulgarly gorgeous car she'd taken out of sheer competitiveness. It had glided like silk over the broad streets of Midtown, floated like a decadent bubble of luxury all the way across King St where its purr was abruptly grounded by the crunch and scrape of a low carriage contacting broken asphalt. There the high-gloss sheen made her a target to a hundred other thieves and she guided the pilfered vehicle as quickly as possible to a harbor side chop shop, dumping it into capable hands that would see its tracking system promptly lobotomized and have it outbound on a cargo ship by morning.

From the passenger seat, Selina sighs dramatically for Jen's benefit. "You know how tough it is to park a car like that in Gotham? I mean, yeah, you're basically asking _really nicely_ for it to be stolen."

Jen's grin is mischievous even in profile. "Oh, he asked nicely? Don't you usually hold out for begging?"

"You know those rich boys, impeccable manners."

"Except for that time he took your pearls." Hurry or no, Jen takes no close calls with traffic lights since there may or may not currently be a warrant out for her arrest, she's been dodging a court summons for a while now. "And like 20 minutes ago when he practically broke into our home."

"Bastard," Selina agrees good-naturedly, inspecting her fingernails.

Rain is still threatening as they approach the manor. With acre upon acre of sculpted lawn there's no ideal approach and this time a catering van is not handy for Selina's purposes. Jen drops her near an outlying building and Selina makes her way toward the east wing of the house on foot, counting on the fact that the first version of Bruce she met seemed like a guy too paranoid to let anyone else monitor his security cameras. And, like the unfortunate owner of Jen's stolen Honda, she knows for a fact he's not home right now.

She's tucked herself into a grotto of immaculate landscaping when the first rain drops fall. Thunder in the distance warns the storm isn't far off. It also muffles the sound of an approaching town car.

Miranda Tate comes with the storm.

()

Bruce can feel the hard edge under his newfound lightness of being. As he pounds on his own front door it waits sharply, like teeth felt behind the lips of a savage kiss. It's the seam of hastily laid plans unraveling, the brass knuckle on the fist this goddamn city has been raising since his father first extended a compassionate hand. Once, Alfred begged him daily to stop fighting for a city locked in a cage match with itself. Then, after Rachel, Alfred begged him to fight for anything at all, to choose legacy over vengeance, life over exile.

But he'd chosen to live once, chosen Rachel over Harvey, Bruce over Batman, and he lost everything. He'd made the choice that mattered most and had the choice taken from him. So he stopped choosing.

The height and weight of his family home looms overhead, rebuilt with precise angles, with thick doors and strong locks. Bruce stares up at the house, locked tight as a mausoleum. "They're letting me keep the house," he'd told Selina Kyle. But all he needs is the cave.

Then there's a hand on his shoulder; there's a pair of eyes, dark blue under hair black with rain, blinking away water like tears. Miranda Tate, the only other living thing braving the storm and the wreckage of his legacy. He's not quite glad to see her. Even soaking wet, her smile is a light that casts deep shadows on his plans. Ugly things, but necessary.

She asks about house keys, laughs, leads him on a run through the rain. Her heels sink into the softening lawn and she shrieks with panicked delight, half-toppling into his arms, the crown of her head coming to rest against his chest. Then she's off again, racing for a window.

He chases after, already knowing. It's not fair that he thinks of Rachel, that he's attached a kind heart and a strong will and a sprint across the Wayne estate to one woman. It's not fair that the ache in his heart and the heat in his blood feel like echoes of how his life could have been.

She's half-dragging him inside—there's something, a door or window, his mind's decades away—and he very nearly puts an end to it. But his thoughts are slow to catch up, chasing the meandering paths of memory. She's holding a photo, asking about Alfred, naming all the places that hurt, kissing him like balm.

He very nearly stops her. Very nearly. He doesn't deserve her. She deserves him even less.

Bruce wants to save a city. Miranda wants to save the world. She wants to save the people, the trees, the lakes and rivers. Lucius and Alfred and everyone who's ever strung together the names Bruce Wayne and Miranda Tate in a sentence want something smaller and grimmer; they want Miranda to save him.

He very nearly stops her. But she's holding that torn photograph like she doesn't need to ask to know its his own broken pieces.

He very nearly stops her but her soft smile gets in his eyes like sunlight and he's kept to the dark for such a long time.

"Shhh," she says, fingertips light across his jaw line. "We're just waiting out the rain."

()

Miranda Tate comes with the storm.

_Hah_, Selina thinks silently because God she hates storm metaphors but a decent orgasm pun shouldn't be passed up. That storm speech she had given Bruce Wayne was the most goddamn melodramatic moment of her life. But it was in the script, it was the way Bane talked and men listened. She'd seen it work, heard him inspire a small army into madness. Bruce Wayne seemed to have plenty of madness but he could use a little inspiration.

Well, Miranda Tate was seeing to that.

_Man lives like a fucking fairytale_, Selina thinks. _Shuts himself up like a beast in a castle until a bleeding heart with a pretty face breaks the spell._

She might be sitting under the ledge of an open window in a thunderstorm listening to two rich kids fuck or make love or whatever Bruce Wayne does with naked and willing women but she'd started out with slightly purer motivations. She'd seen Miranda send away a perfectly good town car, watched her duck behind a shrubbery only to sneak up on the erstwhile Prince of Gotham at an opportune moment, like it was all a happy accident. There was the breathless sprint across the lawn, the feisty attempts to pry open doors, the wide, wet doe eyes blinking back rain.

Then there was the hasty climb through a window and soft questions. Selina could only make out every third word or so of the hushed conversation but she recognized the warm tones that said _trust_ _me, trust me, trust me._

It didn't end there, naturally. Selina had no problem admitting Miranda Tate was good. Selina herself knew how to spin trust from the curl of her eyelashes, lust from the pitch of her voice. That Miranda Tate was good at Selina's own game did not necessarily bode well for Bruce Wayne.

Well, that depended on one's definition of _well_.

That Miranda wanted Bruce's trust was clear enough. Why, Selina didn't know. What she did know was, if trust was a key, sex was a lock pick.

Miranda took her sweet time rising to climax but Bruce Wayne was patient and persistent and probably really goddamn stubborn. Just shy of an hour later—and by then Selina had gotten both bored and hot enough under the collar to take a few peeks through the rain-streaked window -Selina heard moans deepening from the regular delicate sighs she'd grown accustomed to. The woman's voice dissolved into pleading tones, rolling out a string of filth made lovely in French. Selina swore she heard Bruce Wayne laugh.

Slow to warm up, Miranda Tate might be but Selina had to grant that the pay off was rather spectacular; gasping, razor-pitched cries that had the blood pounding in Selina's ears. She probably shook, Selina thought, probably twisted his fingers into his hair and pulled. For his part, Bruce kept her there for what seemed like an eternity, soprano moans rising again each time relief began to enter the cries. Selina crouched in the gentle rain, back pressed to stone, tempted to look but not quite trusting herself to look away before Bruce caught her at it. He'd be the sort to look up, to watch a woman's face while she came.

In the end, the French litany turned to a request, a plea for him to enter her or let her come down. Selina, sympathetic, hoped the rich boy spoke some French, for Tate's sake. Selina herself had spent most of a trip to the Maldives in the frighteningly ecstatic purgatory of serial orgasms. When the vacation ended, she'd even thought about keeping one of the guy's Van Gogh's for herself to remember the guy by.

If the ragged relief in Miranda's voice was anything to go by, Bruce Wayne's French or his instincts were good enough. "Ten minutes," Selina noted with a perverse pride. "Careful Wayne, she almost lost consciousness there."

She leaves before Bruce starts speaking in tongues. She's as thoroughly soaked as they had been before they stripped off in the warm, dry mansion and she's the only one of the three who is going to leave the encounter thoroughly unsatisfied. There's nothing else to learn here and as arousing as it is to picture Bruce's arrogant eyes go wide at her overhearing him and his stuck up girlfriend screwing away the pain…. Selina's woman enough to admit she'd rather not find out second hand what it's like to make Bruce Wayne come undone.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: For the legal bit, kindly get thee to chapter 1

Note: For a story that started off in wet dreams, we've strayed from the path. But bear with me sailors, sexytimes ahead.

**Chapter 4: With a head like a wrecking ball, truth**

In that tunnel he loses time to the sound of steel bars sliding shut, to the way his reality buckles into a solid, sinister shape. It never occurred to him that she might have been telling the truth all along; that she was no better than she pretended to be. His destiny and doom were his own. He wore a mask, He worked alone. But for a short span of time she had been his partner in the dark.

There's power in the way Bane calls his name, calls him back to be a man, aging, alone. It's an old magic, naming a thing, telling it the shape it must take, forsaking all others. Now, in front of a madman and an army of thugs Bruce is stripped even of anonymity, of the secret that he'd only managed to keep from the woman at his back. There it stands between them, broken and heavy as steel bars, his name, the secret he never meant to live long enough to tell.

In the moment before he lunges for Bane, he can see her shadow where it falls before him on the floor like despair, twisting through his, taking on the shape of his sins.

(-)

When it happens it's riveting, like the crack of bone, like the tearing of flesh. Like bright light that gets in your eyes at midnight. She blinks eyes that won't ever adjust to this, paces like she might walk it off, reminds herself she was always going to turn on both of them anyway.

Just not at the same time.

The very worst thing might be that she was just beginning to find a new shape inside her skin, a tiny room, the merest hint that some day, instead of a living like a parachute, she might become a safe place to land. But then his name fell from Bane's lips, a sonorous click, and she became so much hostile territory. Like he'd buried himself, landmine, in the pit of her stomach just in case she tried to walk away, grinning, with her life and a string of pearls.

Bruce Wayne. His back shatters like a bomb going off, reverberates inside the uncrackable walls of her ribs. Bruce Wayne, a bright light in her eyes, the click of a mine, the despair of very nearly getting away unscathed.

(-)

Bruce doesn't think about vengeance in the pit, not sadness or beauty or regret or love or sex or shame; he thinks about pain. It stitches every second together until the ragged edges of days and nights flow like a seamless shroud. It is more constant than the anger or the fear. It is the seed that bears his every thought and act, the very setting of the story of his life. And like a setting it sinks into every sight, every word, finally fading to foundation until the prison is just a prop, his healing a mere plotline.

There's food, plain and colorless, but good enough. Dull, boiled grain, beans, scraps of meat. There's water, tepid, rationed, but clean too; he keeps it down. In his years abroad he'd run through the full gamut of food borne illness, the viciousness of a parched throat opening to Montezuma's Revenge down to the inevitable, endless flux of Bangkok Belly.

There's all the sleep he can want—if he can take it standing, rope around his back in the devil's own traction. There's a roof over his head—too much roof—and no weather to speak of except for the occasional howling sandstorm, passing with the wrath of a distant god. In some ways he's safer than he's ever been, here where Bane's declared his death at another's hands a capitol offense.

The men around him are gaunt souls stretched out over interminable sentences, with spectral voices wrung out from chanting. Were they there by choice, the pit might be a monastery, a Buddhist temple, a solemn, sanctified retreat. A place carved from the earth in honor of a harsh, kind diety. Nothing to need, nowhere to go, everything to want.

Instead it is exile.

He thought he'd known exile, eight years abroad, eight in self-imposed confinement. Eight years learning the tricks to fight his way out of the worst of places, eight years watching most broken of places right itself when he stepped out of the way. He'd turned himself into terror to save his city and then frightened his city out of its need for him. He thought he'd understood then. He was wrong.

The first thing he learns in the pit is there is no such thing as self-imposed exile. To separate oneself from the turn of the world, to live as far on the fringes of humanity as is possible is isolation. But exile is something else altogether. Isolation is about protecting yourself from yourself. Or rather, protecting all the shiny, bright bits of your life—your Rachels and Alfreds and Mirandas, your mother's memory, your father's name—from the taint that fills the ridges in your fingerprints like identity gone wrong, from the shadow on your soul. Isolation is a stunted tree stretching toward moonlight, trying to grow into the most hostile of spaces so it won't block out the sun.

Exile is uprooting, casting out, making helpless. It's life under a foreign sun while your native soil is swept away in the flood.

He learns it as he counts days, feeling the sun blister skin that falls outside the shadows. He thinks of Gotham and air growing crisp, leaves turning toward fall. Flowers on graves, flowers in glass gardens. Children holding hands against the dark. He thinks of frost-slick asphalt under the tires of tanks his money built and his secrets kept safe until Bane revealed he had no secrets at all.

He watches through snowy reception as Gotham's defenses drop through waiting sinkholes; stadiums, banks, Harvey fucking Dent. Coverage is chaotic, dizzy handheld shots of kangaroo courts, a camera panning desolate streets from the sides of a patrolling tumbler, dust rising from collapsed sewers that hold a thousand cloistered cops who whisper revenge like prayer, counting bullets like rosary beads. There were less panoramic displays too, close ups of women and children staring down the barrels of guns, surrounded by leering men, begging for the Batman and mercy and their mothers.

The smallest of mercies is not lost on him. There is no word of John Blake, the boy who hadn't yet managed to die a hero. There's no word on Lucius, on Gordon, on Miranda Tate. They would be there in the thick of it, fighting like fallout shelters, in all the ways he never learned, welcoming the world in, holding it safe until the end.

He didn't see Selina Kyle either on the newsreel, not as victim or torturer, not numbered among the dead. She'd be clear of the city by now or keeping her head down or thrusting it out to bloody the nearest hand before fading away. Like him she is a junkyard dog, beaten down but with her back still pointing toward home. It had stung when her teeth sunk in, when he learned the way she said home would never mean Gotham, had never meant him.

It didn't matter. Her ferocity had a different focus, her loyalty a different name. But she too had been beaten by the hand that fed her, was trapped in Gotham's untender mercy. There were debts on the path to her freedom, guilt, vengeance, love. She was angry at everything, maybe him most of all. He could work with it. It was enough. He knew the chorus her demons sang by heart, the screams of a city that rose even above the pain.

He could hear them screaming in his bones, in his knitting flesh, in the strength returning to his limbs. He chewed them like food, listened to them like lullabies before sleep, dreamed them like every promise he'd ever made. Their pain was his pain. Pain wasn't the eye of the storm, it was the levy that never broke.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: See part one.

Note: And … we're back! Last bit of detail and debris to clean up.

**Chapter 5:** Wake me when it's over

Selina runs, hurtles around corners, bashes suddenly clumsy shoulders into blunt concrete edges. It's the exact opposite of waking from a nightmare, the opposite of breathing deeply and touching familiar objects and finally believing the world is right and orderly and safe from the things that live in dreams. Nothing pursues her but the knowledge that spreads like a pool of decay, like a sinkhole in the soul of the city itself: the Batman has fallen.

She runs up and out and away into a night of distant sirens that wail like a prelude of screaming yet to come. She sprints down alleys familiar with dealers and pimps and murderers, maladies not yet made mundane in context of the horrors snapping at her heels. _It's coming_, she wants to shout but her voice is still choking in the tunnels, her windpipe constricting around much-needed air and all the things she could have said to change his mind.

She showers, dresses, packs a bag for show, waits for dawn. Exhaustion crawls behind her eyes but she won't sleep, not tonight, not until she knows it too well to forget, even in sleep. If she sleeps she'll wake up and wonder for a few moments if it was real, if everything has really changed forever.

(*)

She would have been more surprised not to be caught. As things stand, Blake arrests her like a formality, like the last sad sandbag piled up against the tide that will make a prison of their island city. It's Blackgate for her. Once the prison was a pretrial facility, the acidic gut of Gotham that received the thousands of men and women to pass through the jaws of Central Booking every year. It housed those accused and awaiting trial for longer and longer periods as the court system buckled and rallied again and again under the everyday onslaught of drug possession and property theft.

The Dent Act did away with all that. Now a higher percentage of Gotham's citizens are in prison than in any other city in a country that jails more of its population than any nation in the world. Now Blackgate stands at the city's heart, no longer housing the thousands of innocents-until-proven-guilty but the guilty by assumption and decree.

So it's the familiar dance for her: squad car, sally port, medical exam, search, booking, fingerprinting, phone call. "Jen," she says, "Paris is wonderful this time of year."

And Jen, who saw Selina's face that last morning without ever getting a word out of her says, "Give them hell, baby girl."

She waits in a cell constructed first of bars and reaching hands, then cinderblock walls, then all the things she's ever done. She waits with the buzz in her ears that is the birthright of the criminal class, the simmering, murmuring knowledge that the walls will soon crumble into dust and those inside with rise with the smoke, the dark mirror of every fairytale ever told. She waits like an anarchy of one, immolation from the ankles up, a fractal of the city Bane will create, one given everything it's ever wanted in the worst possible way.

(*)

During the early days of the siege she thinks of Jesus in the desert, of Tom Hanks losing his mind over a fucking volleyball. She's islanded in a sea of people, awash in the din of fear and joy, clinging to guilt grounded in the knowledge that she'd do it all again just the same. Except … except maybe if she'd looked a little harder, been less fooled by everything she'd ever thought about him.

She feels smaller than she ever has in her life, walking the streets of Gotham, standing on the edge of a local apocalypse that's at least partly of her own making. She feels too small to contain the fury of emotion raging in the wake of that night in the sewers, she who had always kept things simple, who'd tried never to feel more than one thing at a time. Small, chaotic, fierce, no clarity but all purpose, all thought funneled to one end. A rebel with no cause but escape.

(*)

"Come to the party," Jen says, voice emanating from a riot of finery, a collar of silver and diamonds and mink.

"Things to do," Selina replies as if her own outfit hadn't already made that clear.

"When you say 'things' can you please mean men? Or women. Or both. Whatever."

"Sure."

"Selina."

"I'm fine."

It's one month into the siege and the patterns are already settled, how things go, who they all are in the new order of things. Just one month to rebuild Rome. Just one month since he died.

"How long's it been since you had any fun."

"A week," Selina lies. It's not the answer to Jen's question, just the cause of an itch. One week. Since the age of sixteen, Selina Kyle hadn't gone more than a week without sex. It's not like she kept a tally but when the first endless hours of Bane's siege hung like humidity in August, stretching on and on into weeks and then months, when tension settled in her belly as deep and primal as hunger and pain but duller, rubbing gently at her soft spots, calling her attention away from flashbulb memories of terrors in the dark … well, she put two and two together. Thinking back over her habits, her marks and conquests and ways to pay the rent, she had never gone longer than a week.

Somehow even that thought brought her back to Bruce Wayne these days.

"Who are you pretending to be," she'd asked.

"Bruce Wayne, eccentric billionaire." His chest loomed large in her mind's eye, solid and thick and close. She's never been shy about desire but she thinks this might feel something like shame.

"You're dead," she tells his memory. "It was self-defense."

"Come to the party," Jen insists.

"I'm not dressed for your crowd."

(*)

His voice sounds small in the chilled air. Small enough that she almost believes he's just a man. He talks and for a moment she doesn't trust her knees; doesn't move but to dig fingertips into pockets so they won't reach out for a ghost.

Even up close, she can't smell him under the patina of wood smoke, the constantly smoldering fires of Gotham's antique clocks and molding floorboards, sacrificed to Bane and the lack of central heating. His breath mingles with hers in the air like they might inhabit the same plane, like he hasn't transcended death, like she's anything more than his fickle, skittish shadow.

But as he talks, anger grounds her, her footing growing solid for the first time in months. "You don't owe these people anything." He hasn't been here to see the city eat itself alive, to watch everything anyone ever feared from it come true. "You've already given them everything."

He speaks words like sutures, stitching fast all the parts of her that only want to make it out alive. "Not everything," he says. "Not yet."

He stands close and tells her his plan, infiltrate the tower, rescue the girl, save the city. He asks for little and hands her everything in return: her escape route, her fresh start, her new life free of Bane and Blackgate and even the Bat himself. Everything she's ever wanted in the worst possible way.

She just nods. For all that, she doesn't want it any less. She doesn't take the time—not now- to wonder if she wants him more.

(*)

Including psych facilities, there are twenty-three hospitals within the Gotham City limits. Jim Gordon calls all of them, using the collective hours on hold to direct the first feeble efforts to assess the fallout of the siege. "White male," he says for the final time, "late thirties, probably multiple traumatic injuries, maybe burns, a stab wound to the right flank."

He'd already tried _Bruce Wayne_, now he's looking for John Does.

"We have at least one person that might fit that description, Commissioner. But he's a 'HIPAA no.'"

It's not the first time he's run into that particular red tape today, the privacy law that prevented even the police from getting information about a patient over the phone. He's too tired to curse. "How is he?"

"Currently unstable," says the voice on the other end of the line.

This time Gordon does curse. "Look…how unstable? If I make it down there in the next hour or two, is he going to be there?"

"I'm sorry Commissioner, I've told you all I can." The woman is kind but firm. He pictures the sort of nurse that's body checked him on more than one occasion for getting in the way of a resuscitation team working on a gangbanger.

"Yeah. Thanks."

Nine hospitals, seventeen John Does who are probably anybody else but who could be Bruce Wayne. The Batman.

(*)

"You want updates on your people?"

"Nah, give me the full run through, I have a trainee."

"Okay…room 18 is a Trauma Doe, male, brought in by Express Evac Air from Gotham U on Saturday. He has a stab wound to the right flank, status-post ex-lap, grade III liver with retroperitoneal bleeding. CT and x-ray revealed probable past splenectomy, neuro-trauma, multiple healed fractures, and extensive damage to cartilage at bilateral elbows and right knee. Neuro-wise …."

"…."

"I'll be honest, I missed a lot of that."

"No problem, it's your first day. The main point is the guy's pretty sick but out of the woods."

"He's been here four days and still hasn't been ID'd?"

"First day I had him, I heard we were basically waiting for someone to call from Bethesda and claim him."

"Bethesda? That wasn't in my medical terminology class."

"Bethesda, Maryland. Big military hospital there, you know. Guy clearly has a violent past but no cops are showing up, he didn't come in under arrest. So, everybody figured the military might come calling next …."

"But not you."

"Came in from Gotham U, right? I'm pretty good at faces … but, well, see if you don't recognize him too."

"Yeah … okay."

"Hey, don't worry. I won't put you out there on your own today, not even to dump a urinal and definitely not long enough to kill anybody. Ready?"

"Close enough."

"Great."

"…."

"First we have to turn down the prope drip for a few minutes so he can wake up. Hi, sir. Good morning, It's Ray, back for night shift. Can you open your eyes for me? Come on, open them up. Good, good, try again. I have a young lady with me today training to be a patient care technician, so you've got twice the attention tonight, alright?"

"So … really? No one knew when he came in?"

"We're a state away, I guess no one thought he'd end up here. But…."

"But that's Bruce Wayne."

"Yeah. MIA billionaire philanthropist who's extremely stubborn about opening his eyes."

"Well … have you tried …?"

"Now that you mention it …. Mr. Wayne … Bruce, Bruce, open your eyes. It's your nurse, Ray. Open your eyes Bruce, I want you to meet Selina."


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: See part 1

6: Penitents

Realization like a fever rose in him: he hadn't escaped the flames. Heat panted down the nape of his neck, licked the small of his back, rolled over his body in waves, welling up through him and from him. He fought the weight of blankets that had closed over him like war tunnels, like sewers, like vertical miles of desert sand.

He knew he was in a hospital, knew by the smells, the sounds, the swarms of unfamiliar faces backlit by the flashbulb burn of fluorescent light. Gloved hands that shook him awake at all hours. The therapeutic inquisition, a headache of endless questions about who he was, what had happened, was he in pain, was he in pain, was he in pain.

He didn't answer. He clamped dry lips around a tongue thick and textured with disuse that sat heavily in his throat. He'd felt that unique discomfort before, the razed aftermath of a breathing tube, the sticky feeling of a body scrubbed sterile and sewn back together, it's parts still fraying at the hems. Something had happened to him. Something substantial. Maybe his city had burned down. Maybe he had died a little.

He couldn't remember. That didn't stop them asking.

He let silence fall for long stretches, weighing heavily on the conventions of comfort and conversation. What had happened to him? He didn't answer. Images shivered behind his eyes, swallowed him while half awake. Miranda, dead. Bane too, Selina Kyle appearing like a Cheshire grin to punch him through a wall.

He could remember the Pit. Terror, heat, pain. He could remember the fire that licked Harvey Dent's face, the grainy images of a darkened Gotham hulking under a slick of ice and snow. He could remember the sound of his back breaking, of a knife sliding into the hollow beneath his ribs, of steel tumblers clattering into place as Selina Kyle locked a door like a cage behind him.

Selina Kyle. He remembered her voice too well, its affected purr, velvet padded over claws. "Mr. Wayne," it said flatly, a tone that wasn't paid to care. "Open your mouth." It sounded closer than memory, looming out of the dark, ethereal and full of teeth.

He could remember Selina Kyle. He could almost, almost remember deciding to live.

He pushed his eyelids open past the dulled pain, curious. But the room swam blurrily at a narcotic distance. He knew he knew her and he knew there was pain. But that knowledge stood separate from him by the filmy glass ceiling of opiate haze. He knew. He knew. But he couldn't figure out how to care.

"Bruce," her voice said, clipped now with a familiar annoyance. It dropped through his mind like a lodestone "Open your goddamned mouth, I have other patients, I don't have all night." Then there was a hand on his jaw. Not gentle, not exactly, but gloveless, a modern medical taboo. He jerked his chin back clumsily, the touch somehow profoundly intimate on skin languid with morphine.

"Suit yourself," said Selina Kyle. "I can take your temperature the other way if you insist. Roll over."

He didn't answer. But he laughed.

It had only been two weeks but she was a quick learner. If it had been up to her, she wouldn't have taken him as a patient every shift. To waylay suspicion, to save him some dignity, and just maybe to surprise herself with how good he looked after a few days away. But John Doe or not, Bruce Wayne had friends in low places. There was a small rotation of staff dedicated his case, no cops, no cameras, and he'd never said anything but "HIPAA no," those magical medical words that spill from his mouth like red tape, making the outside world out of bounds. So she'd been assigned to him every shift and she'd picked up overtime.

The jargon was already hitting a familiar cadence, the slang of the overeducated falling into a discernible patter of connections and meaning. Innocent words rearing up with brass knuckles. Strong drugs ravaging bodies like purging fire.

A few days in, Bruce had been coming around, not talking, not even opening his eyes if he sensed her in the room but coming around. He was still pissing everyone off, refusing to speak, to eat, to move any more than was absolutely necessary. The gaggle of young nurses and medical interns who'd at first leapt at the chance to care for the dreamy albeit battered patient in room 17 soon gave way under his long silences and hard stares.

But still, he was getting better. Everyone said so, the nurses who stood vigil, examining him with instinct and science, the hive mind of doctors who swarmed in to pronounce judgment at the crack of dawn. The numbers she herself collected: rate, pressure, saturation…the careful, improving patterns of his lungs and heart. Once, just once, he'd laughed. Despite his entirely absent efforts, Bruce Wayne was healing.

Then the patterns started to shift.

That Tuesday night two veteran nurses, lifers in the trauma center, stood in his doorway while Selina went through the strangely satisfying tedium of blood draws, a skill, it seemed, traditionally learned in trial by fire. She was tourniquetting the bicep of the man who had been Batman, watching veins flare up on a well-muscled arm, mapping them with her fingertips.

"He's going to crump on us," said Dana's voice from the hallway. Selina could just see the nurse's profile out of the corner of her eye as she, Selina, finessed a butterfly needle into a likely vessel.

"Shhh," Ray hissed, the same hiss he used when a newbie mentioned the night was slow or a notorious patient was fast asleep.

Blood flashed into the catheter and Selina held her hand steady, smoothly switching out one sample tube for another as they filled, a science that looked more like ritual sacrifice, like blood letting in tribute to hungry gods.

"I'm just saying," Dana argued, brazen but apologetic. "He's refusing to work with Physical Therapy, he should have been up and walking by now. His white count's been creeping up. His heart rate's way off baseline."

"His rate's still normal," Ray said, echoing Selina's own thoughts. But the senior nurse spoke with a shrug in his voice, a lack of conviction that settled coldly in Selina's gut. "Technically."

"He came in with a rate in the 80s and that's when he was hypovolemic and in pain. Guy was clearly in good shape before all this, his baseline is probably like Lance Armstrong low, like, resting in the 40s at highest," Dana's tone took on a lecturing quality Selina was already familiar with, the tone that said_, look, we've both done this shit long enough to know how it'll go. _"There's no reason he should be asleep and in the high 90s."

Selina had released the tourniquet and was bagging her labs when Dana asked, as if already knowing her point would be made, "Selina, what's his latest temp?"

Selina suppressed a hiss of her own, finding the collective superstitious unconscious of those who care for the sick setting up camp at the edges of her native logic. "He's running a low grade fever." The words came out in a mumble that was foreign to her ears and she understood she was acting on some baser instinct, trying to catch the words behind her teeth, keep them inside, unheard and unreal.

"He's already on IV antibiotics," Dana said like a judge passing a sentence she regretted. "He's going to crump."

It was 3am, just shy of 24 hours later, when Selina heard the hint of a plea in her own mocking tone. "It was a stab, you ass," she chided. "You run around in a rubber suit defending the downtrodden and beating up mobsters and you're going to let a stab to the gut get you? Jesus Christ, Bruce, I know a guy who took 13 bullets and walked out of the hospital two and a half weeks later and he was a goddamn street punk." She knew just enough by now to know she was full of shit. Gut wounds were some of the worst, though Bruce had gotten lucky, his intestines hadn't been so much as nicked which would have been a whole other level of catastrophe.

"What do you want?" Bruce was facing away from her, lying on his side as she'd pushed and cajoled him to do so she could pound on his back with cupped palms and break up the fluid that had begun to settle in his lungs after days of stubborn immobility. He'd been seen by psych, by pastoral care, by every nurse on the unit. He'd speak to none of them. He wouldn't even look at Selina.

"Cough." She commanded.

He coughed, a thick, wet sound. But not, she noted, as thick or as wet as it could have been.

"Again."

He complied.

"Good, now stand up."

"Why?"

There was an odd lack of color in the question, a gray apathy. She pulled off her gloves with a snap, tossing them into his rumpled sheets and walked around the broad hospital bed. His eyes were closed in a determined, stubborn grimace, the way a teenaged boy sleeps through any efforts made to wake him before noon. She put a hand on his shoulder, his skin was hot and unfamiliar, the touch taboo in more ways than one. "Up," she said again, shaking him.

"Why?"

This time it was a child's question, one that could go on forever, skating over trivialities, burrowing into the depths of the human soul. Why should he get up, why go on, why had he come back to save them? Why did it matter? Why did it matter to her? He was asking all that. And more. It was just like him, 0 to 60, all or nothing.

She ignored him.

"Because I haven't been able to measure your weight since you got here and the nurses are getting on my case about it. Now get your ass up so I can zero the bed scale."

"Like you care," he said but held out his hand to grip hers, opening his eyes just a sliver.

She gripped his left with hers, stretching the right to shut off the bed alarm. She braced him with a firm grip and he heaved his tattered torso to a sitting position. "Stronger than you look." His voice was quiet but it didn't rattle, hadn't quite fallen into the elective antiquity she'd heard that first night as he looked at her down the site of a bow.

"You already knew that," she said, maintaining her grip but rolling her eyes dramatically at the weak attempt at wit so wouldn't think she'd gone soft. "Dizzy?"

He nodded. "Can't blame me at such close proximity to a well dressed woman." He cut his eyes at her scrubs, threadbare and powder pink, cut for men so the crotch hung low and the shoulders too broad, despite the overwhelming majority of women in the profession.

"You're one to talk," she said, not at all above mocking the infirm. "You're about to flash your ass at whoever's in this hallway."

"Lucky them," he retorted, very nearly surprising her.

"Maybe a few weeks ago, killer. But hospital is not a good look for anybody."

"You're really not going to tie this gown for me, are you?"

"I'm really not." The vertical incision through his abdominal muscles did not lend itself well to twisting to see to one's modesty.

"Selina."

"A name!" She crowed, laying the faux drama on thick. "Would you look at that he _remembers_ something! Hallelujah!"

"Selina."

"Now just say your own damn name when Dana comes in here and I'll get a promotion."

"Who's Dana?"

"Seriously, rich boy? Your nurse. For the past three days. Damn, Bruce, half-dead and stuck up as ever."

"You're not my nurse?" he said, blatantly ignoring her.

Selina's laugh was more of a snort. "I'm your tech. If I were your nurse I'd have killed you by now. Maybe by accident. I've got a walker for you right here, old man. Now get up."

All witty banter and genuine annoyance aside, she'd wanted him to sit on the side of the bed for a while before he tried to stand. It was wildly against the rules for her to walk a patient alone and for the first time but Bruce Wayne had lost enough of the good will of the staff with his abysmal attitude that she was reasonably sure she wouldn't catch much flak (or, more importantly, get fired and banned from his care) as long as he didn't crack his skull on the floor.

Bruce lurched to his feet all at once, forgoing the walker but still gripping her hand. Selina's other hand shot out to steady him. She cursed creatively. "You have staples holding your guts together, Wayne."

He swayed on his feet for just a moment, leaning lightly on the shoulder she'd wedged on his. "Staples," he shrugged. "A few months ago a prison doctor hung me from the ceiling of a cave with a rope to reset my vertebrae."

Never having heard him exaggerate, Selina was lost for a clever reply. "What?"

"I'll tell you all about sometime over dinner, Ms. Kyle."

He took a step.

"Is that appropriate dinner conversation where you come from, Mr. Wayne? Or are you just poorly socialized?" He took another step. "And does that mean you plan to start eating again, then?"

He took another step and she could see the edge of a smile even from her too myopic view.

"How's the stomach feel?" She asked, supporting him as he took slow, steady steps toward the hallway.

"Oh, are you playing nurse again? Is that harder or easier than social climber?"

"Please." She clicked her tongue to further illustrate the stupidity of the question and briefly considered tripping him. "How's your stomach?"

"Hurts."

"Knives will do that," Selina offered helpfully. "And French women."

Bruce laughed but quickly seemed to think better of it, one hand drifting to his abdomen.

"Need a break?" Selina asked casually, eyes locking on a tiny damp spot on the front of his hospital gown.

"Aren't you supposed to tell me to push through the pain?"

"Fuck if I know," Selina replied, scanning the slice of hallway she could see through the door for a convenient chair, or better yet, a nurse. "I'm just pretending to do this job, remember?"

"Didn't you draw my blood last night?"

"I've got a soft touch. Excellent with my hands."

"I bet."

The stain was growing, not blood, but definitely wet and it definitely occupied the patch of gown over the staples in his abdomen. "Stop."

"What?" He reacted to the alarm in her voice like he might have that night in the tunnels f she'd offered it, bending his knees to spring, turning to seek out the attack.

"Just stop." She shifted her stance so she could still support him with her shoulder and pull his gown aside, disregarding his protests entirely. "Help!" She shouted, the cry of distress she'd perfected over years of cons failing so her voice croaked on the first syllable. "Help!"

The staples at the center of his belly had burst open.


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: See part 1

**7: Divergent **

She thought, sometimes, how different a mark he would have been if she'd dared to try him eight years previously. "Look at him and his pretty face jizzed across the tabloids," Jen had said once, crude with youth. "I vote him next, Selina. Liberate some of that old family money he's gagging to toss around." She brandished the Star with its cover shot of Bruce Wayne and the debutantes on each arm he'd bought at a charity auction. The billionaire had turned up in Gotham a month before, having gone from the angry, maladjusted youth older Gotham residents remembered to this dim-witted, tumultuous playboy, flamboyant in his excess and charm.

Selina had rolled her eyes in response. "I steer clear of the needy little boys," she'd said of the man nearly a decade her senior. "It's all insecurity and mommy issues with them. He'd hand me an easy million to dress up in leather and step on his balls but where's the fun in that? He wouldn't even miss it."

"Alright there, Robin Hood," Jen said, only tip toeing into what was already an old argument between them. "Just remember that when rent time comes around."

Had she tried the boy billionaire then, wild and reclusive by turns, what would she have found? Would she, younger and newer to her art, have made it past the veneer of lazy, schoolboy charisma? Would her instincts catch on the hooks of the subtle, quicksilver mind buried beneath everything that had ever been said about him? Or would he have taken her out on the town, paid for lavish meals and expensive gifts and then curtly sent her home in his private limousine? It's what the smaller, quieter rumor mill churned out in those days: he surrounded himself with the trappings of debaucherous dreams and then turned a cold shoulder and went home to a cold bed at the end of the night.

If she were honest with herself, she knew he'd have fooled her as thoroughly then as he had later. Had she made it past his public face, into his home heavily populated by priceless artwork and persistent ghosts, into his bed, lightly populated and only then by a body scourged by silent war, she would have fled. Maybe with a painting in tow, maybe a string of pearls, but catching even a glimpse of what he was, what he could be to her, she would have bolted.

Selina Kyle knew the human body the way some people knew dusty grand pianos, or blocks of marble hiding masterpieces. In the span of a night she could teach graying moguls the prowess that had escaped them in vain, unseasoned youth. She could turn the anxious and impotent into veritable gods, always powerful and brilliant, and only ever waiting for this one perfect woman to help them come into their own. She could cast them on the wheel, paunchy, balding, guilty, vile, greedy, and coax them into new shapes, desirable and virile. Then she'd leave before the shapes collapsed, leave them already melting back into their baser elements, lighter for the jewels she'd liberated, heavier for the knowledge that, for all their wealth, they were no more to her than mud.

But Bruce Wayne…. She'd have approached him like anyone else. Let him undress her in a feverish rush under soft light, forced him to kneel before her, a proud, naked goddess, all the while whispering what she wanted from him until he was deified and burning. She wouldn't have taken the time yet to run her hands over his body like worship, to feed his vanity with long caresses and short scrapes of teeth and nails. So, if she wasn't looking down at him, wasn't planning her next move, if he managed to shock her by being exactly as good as he looked, she might not have noticed the scars and bruises congealing on his skin like half-tamed addictions. Not until it was too late.

It wasn't that Bruce Wayne would beat her at her own game, not by a long shot. But if he let her…not under his skin but beside it, if he trusted her even as far as the scars on his body, trusted her to wrap her mind around the inherent inconsistencies of the billionaire playboy and the battered ascetic they wouldn't be playing by her rules anymore. She'd been fucked by the cream of society, debased herself for the upper crust, perpetrated on herself every vulgar and vile act she could think of just so the slap would ring louder when she took the very things they'd bought on the beat down backs of people just like her. Just so they'd feel both stolen from and spat upon. Just so they'd understand that the people who are weakest and most vulnerable will only take so much abuse before they sprout claws.

But there'd be no hate-fucking with Bruce, no glorious, humiliating romp that left him sated and her once again cauterized against any sympathies for his kind that bled into her while he slept. He might give her the hard use she sought from people like him but in the end, there was no one quite like Bruce Wayne. He might match her tat for tat, might tease her and bate her and avoid every trick she knew of how to wring pleasure from his body while holding herself apart from it all. But if he let her in that close, there would be no hiding from him, had never been. He'd see right through her like he had from the first, see how much she hated everything she thought she knew about him, how she feared and craved all the things she was only beginning to suspect. There in the dark she'd see the shape of the shadow he cast, molded from everyday evils, chiseled by the same ungentle mercy of the city that shaped her.

She thought of these things in the dark of the tiny apartment that she shared with another tech. It could have gone so many way, she knew, so many ways before it came to this, She could have been done with him long ago she reminded herself after the night he'd agreed to stand up and his guts had opened up, skin sighing and sloughing open at the stapled seam.

Her gorge had risen with rank fear, with complete inability to control what happened next. Nurses had rushed with restrained panic, guiding their stubborn John Doe back to bed with firm hands. A spotty on-call resident had been paged, had looked more than a little frightened of the ragged edges of the surgical wound, of the pus streaming thickly from the diminutive flank wound, so long dormant, where the blade had gone in.

"What the fuck?" Selina asked Dana, even before the commotion had died down.

"You fixed him!" Dana decreed brightly but with that gallows glint in her eye that said it took a very mangled mindset to see the world like a trauma nurse.

"I thought he was getting better."

"He will now that we know where his fever's coming from," Dana said, pulling supplies to redress wounds and guard Bruce's open gut until he was whisked away for surgery. "Plus, he needed to get up and walk. I've been bullying him about it for days." She nodded matter-of-factly, thoroughly ignoring the fact that Bruce could hear every word. "You fixed him."

"But why…he's on all those antibiotics…."

Dana shrugged. "Wounds get infected. Plus, it's not like the person who stabbed him sterilized the blade first."

At that Selina and Bruce locked eyes. Bruce's brow furrowed briefly in thought and realization as a silent conversation passed between them about the twisted pathos of Miranda Tate. "Oh for fuck's sake," Selina said and promptly left the unit to call Lucius Fox about poisoned blades and antidotes.

Things could have gone so many ways but she wasn't done with Bruce Wayne yet.


End file.
